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New Wood - Need Opinions

One of my Koa suppliers in Hawaii sent me some small pieces of Hawaiian Silky Oak as samples of another wood that he thought would be good for handle materials. The coloring was kind of bland and the pieces were under 1" thick so I set the wood aside and forgot about it. A while back I started getting requests from some of my customers who had been buying knife handle blocks and cutting them up to make pens with. One week there were about ten requests so I figured I would get some pen blank sized pieces cut and in the web store. The Silky Oak was the perfect thickness so I cut it up but had it dyed to hopefully make it look better. This is how it turned out. The black stuff looks kind of like carbon fiber to me.

The pen blanks are about 6" long by just over 3/4" square. Would they work with paring knives? or ferrule material?
Do you guys like the look enough that maybe I should get some bigger stuff for regular sized knife handle blocks?
Please let me know what you think.

Not a fan either, let's hope the pen people have a use for them. A bit too small for wa handles IMHO. I tried 7/8" pen blanks but by the time you have sanded them into shape and polished them, they make for really small handles.

With the blue ones the pink spots are areas of the wood that had reddish flecks that resisted the dye.
The darker blue ones were more or less colorless areas of the wood.
Those portions have a color change when the light hits from different angles going from blue to purple and some green.